With the advent of new technology, e.g., home gateways with multiple tuners and Converged Cable Access Platforms (CCAPs), and the like, managed IP video services are now becoming feasible and cost-effective. Multicast streaming of content using ABR techniques is also being exploited for developing an all-IP cloud-based approach to delivering multimedia programming. Content ingest, encoding, packaging and ways to support alternate content and advertisement insertion (“ad insertion”) are also being explored.
Within the domain of conventional broadcast radio and television, the process of ad insertion into a particular broadcast is well known. Conventionally, broadcast advertisement content insertion may occur both at national network and local/regional network levels. At the national network level, advertisements are often inserted into the network feed before the broadcast content is transmitted over, for example, a particular national distribution network. At the regional network level, local advertisements may be inserted into a received national feed by, for example, the regional/local radio or TV broadcast station and such advertisements may typically replace some or all of the national network advertisements. Such local advertisements may be targeted to the demographics of the entire service area of the particular broadcast station and may advertise the local businesses, e.g., local grocery stores, restaurants, etc. Although such techniques exist in the traditional content delivery systems, it should be appreciated that there are no known advertising systems that target ads for multicast content at a granularity level as will be described below.